Sante writes of the tens of thousands of anonymous men, many of them immigrants and African Americans, who have toiled on these projects, often living in hastily built settlements and leaving few traces.
Sante has always had an underdog leftist sense of what has been threatened or lost. The best material in “Nineteen Reservoirs” is about the people whose lands were colonially confiscated and flooded. She writes:
The people whose land was taken reacted with disbelief, sadness, anger. That land might have been in their family for generations, maybe it was the family’s only support, maybe it was the only home they’d ever known. The city ordered and mobilized and sentenced properties for confiscation without asking the residents’ consent, found all kinds of legal pretexts to deny the value of their fields and houses as determined by expert witnesses, ignored any estimate, treated them with distant contempt.
Certainties were shattered. There were lawsuits, and holdouts. Cemeteries had to be moved. Albany residents drank filtered water from the Hudson River; some argued that New York City should follow suit. No spire will ever ghostly emerge from the waterline because all the buildings have been razed to the ground in the manner of the planners. The construction of the reservoirs only exacerbated the political polarization between the city and the state. There is no broom big enough to sweep up the psychic mess.
New York City continues to grow, but it uses less reservoir water than ever, thanks to the ubiquity of bottled water, a decline in production and, Sante writes, “the cumulative effect of all those years of water-waste warnings and the gradual installation of dripless faucets and taps.” low flow toilets.”
Manhattan may be surrounded by water, but none of it is drinkable. Most residents have no idea where what flows from their taps comes from.
They are “only occasionally made aware that it is a precious and very finite resource that will one day become scarce again — perhaps quite soon,” Sante writes. “By then there will be no untapped mountain valleys to draw from.”